One fateful evening in the summer of 1982, 5 young men who worked for a renowned chartered accountancy firm decided that it was time they struck out on their own to create an enterprise that would someday become an iconic name in the financial services space.

They came from ordinary middle class backgrounds. They had two assets; one was their education and the other an unquenchable desire to succeed. They had a lot stacked against them: the environment was not conducive to entrepreneurship; technology was not fully supportive, financial markets were largely unregulated, they were based out of Hyderabad while most key players in the financial world were in Mumbai or other metros and the wolf was at the door. The odds seemed insurmountable.